Natural Sciences

Architect Charles Klauder, who set the campus aesthetic in the early 1900s with the design of several buildings, once said, "Many an old grad has reflected that students may come and go, classes enter and graduate, but that venerable walls and carved chimney-pieces, picturesque gables and vaulted archways endure forever."

Seated high in the Rocky Mountains west of Fort Collins, Zimmerman Lake was abuzz last week, and not just from the swarms of pesky mosquitos that had a heyday dive-bombing visitors.

Instead, scientists and students from the University of Colorado Boulder and fisheries biologists and managers from state and federal natural resource agencies were focused on the inhabitants of a water tank in the back of a Colorado Parks and Wildlife fish-stocking truck. Inside were hundreds of colorful trout known as greenback cutthroats, about to be released into their native river drainage after vanishing for decades.

In 2012, people across the globe were dazzled to learn that the Large Hadron Collider—a 17-mile ring buried underground on the border of Switzerland and France—had for the first time provided evidence of the elusive Higgs Boson.

The discovery was made after scientists accelerated two beams of protons in the underground tube to nearly the speed of light and then crashed them into each other. The violent collision produced an array of exotic subatomic particles, including the Higgs Boson, that live only briefly before decaying away.

Brennan Coffey—one of three CU-Boulder undergraduates to win a coveted Goldwater Scholarship this year for high academic merit—has logged long hours at the gym. An avid bodybuilder, Coffey’s weightlifting sessions have sculpted both his body and his interest in science.

University of Colorado Boulder biologist Leslie Leinwand has been selected as a member of the 2014 class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which honors the leading “thinkers and doers” from each generation, including scientists, scholars, writers and artists.

Leinwand—chief scientific officer for CU-Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute and a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology—is an expert in cardiovascular disease.

A simple sample of the protective mucus layer that coats a frog’s skin can now be analyzed to determine how susceptible the frog is to disease, thanks to a technique developed by a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The same method can be used to determine what kind of probiotic skin wash might be most effective at bolstering the frog’s defenses without actually exposing the frog to disease, according to a journal article published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

A University of Colorado Boulder professor who developed a clever method to measure snow depth using GPS signals is collaborating with Western Slope officials to make the data freely available to a variety of users on a daily basis.

During two days of intensive airborne measurements, oil and gas operations in Colorado’s Front Range leaked nearly three times as much methane, a greenhouse gas, as predicted based on inventory estimates, and seven times as much benzene, a regulated air toxic.

University of Colorado Boulder graduate student Emi Tokuda is trying to find effective ways to battle melanoma, a notoriously drug-resistant disease that is responsible for 75 percent of all skin cancer-related deaths. She is the subject of one of a slew of videos recently produced for LabTV, and filmed by Emilie Johnson, a graduate student in journalism at CU-Boulder. The video was recently named a Finalist Award Winner by LabTV at the Tribeca Film Festival.